Quotes About Mediocrities

#1. Purging trial, fidelities through storm, perseverance through mediocrities, and pursuit of Divine destiny through the allurements of earth.

Fulton J. Sheen

#2. Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.

Vladimir Nabokov

#3. In this life, we are not garments which may be washed and worn again, Karris. We are candles, giving light and heat until we are consumed. You burned more brightly than most. It has a cost. Mediocrities like me? Dim flames burn longer.

Brent Weeks

#4. One of those middle-aged mediocrities so common in London clubs who have no enemies, but are thoroughly disliked by their friends;

Oscar Wilde

#5. Our colleges ought to have lit up in us a lasting relish for a better kind of man, a loss of appetite for mediocrities.

William James

#6. In a novel, the author gives the leading character intelligence and distinction. Fate goes to less trouble: mediocrities play a part in great events simply from happening to be there.

Charles Maurice De Talleyrand

#7. Only mediocrities progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which is no less perfect than the last.

Oscar Wilde

#8. I have worked on very good movies that have been buried, and I've worked on some resounding mediocrities that have been paraded through the marketplace like they were masterpieces.

Tommy Lee Jones

#9. Those touchy mediocrities who sit trembling lest someone's work prove greater than their own - they have no inkling of the loneliness that comes when you reach the top. The loneliness for an equal - for a mind to respect and an achievement to admire.

Ayn Rand

#10. It is in the nature of democracies, perhaps, that while visionaries are sometimes necessary to make them, once made they can be managed by mediocrities.

Ramachandra Guha

#11. The appearance of a single great genius is more than equivalent to the birth of a hundred mediocrities.

Cesare Lombroso

#12. Ridicule is the tribute paid to the genius by the mediocrities.

Oscar Wilde

#13. It's always the same: mediocrities are over-valued and great men are rejected.

Anton Webern

#14. Most men - it is my experience - are neither virtuous nor scoundrels, good-hearted nor bad-hearted. They are a little of one thing and a little of the other and nothing for any length of time: ignoble mediocrities.

Robert Graves

#15. Mean-spirited mediocrities, especially those with a smattering of learning, are the most likely to be opinionated. Only strong minds know how to correct their opinions and abandon a bad position.

Madeleine De Souvre, Marquise De ...

#16. I speak for all mediocrities in the world. I am their champion. I am their patron saint.

Peter Shaffer

#17. Our democratic dogma has leveled not only all voters but all leaders; we delight to show that living geniuses are only mediocrities, and that dead ones are myths. If

Will Durant

#18. The gods destroy the heroes with a sudden blow, but they grind us mediocrities for weary, weary years.

Robertson Davies

#19. Only mediocrities rise to the top in a system that won't tolerate wave making.

Laurence J. Peter

#20. Public Opinion, this invisible, intangible, omnipresent, despotic tyrant; this thousand-headed Hydra - the more dangerous for being composed of individual mediocrities ...

H. P. Blavatsky

#21. There are as many mediocrities exalted through pity as masters decried through envy.

Honore De Balzac

#22. You have the army of mediocrities followed by the multitude of fools. As the mediocrities and the fools always form the immense majority, it is impossible for them to elect an intelligent government.

Guy De Maupassant

#23. Great innovators and original thinkers and artists attract the wrath of mediocrities as lightning rods draw the flashes.

Theodor Reik

#24. Forget the fountain of youth, pal of mine. You can live to be a thousand, and it won't matter. Mediocrities like you deserve immortality.

Gary Shteyngart

#25. Regulators are power-lusting mediocrities.

Yaron Brook

#26. Creative people are often found either disagreeable or intimidating by mediocrities.

Criss Jami

#27. Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviev or Kant or Marx. Only individuals seek the truth, and they shun those whose sole concern is not the truth.

Boris Pasternak

#28. You know, larger than life is always better than smaller than life in politicians. And, you know, God save us from mediocrities.

Joe Klein

#29. Mediocrities can tolerate being surrounded only by flatterers who conceal their mediocrity.

Maurice Druon

#30. Indifference is the revenge the world takes on mediocrities.

Oscar Wilde

#31. The world is a republic of mediocrities, and always was.

Thomas Carlyle

#32. Innovation is a twofold threat to academic mediocrities: it endangers their oracular authority, and it evokes the deeper fear that their whole, laboriously constructed intellectual edifice might collapse.

Arthur Koestler